Cortina Systems has announced 28nm Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC) PHY architecture. The first member of this architecture is the CS4343 Octal 15G EDC device. Cortina claims the CS4343’s baseline architecture leads the industry less than 1 nsec latency in a 17mm x 17mm package, while lowering power consumption by 50% over previous generations. The CS4343 supports operating frequency range from 1 to 15Gbps and all the major standards used in data centers, storage, high performance computing, and wireless backhaul applications including 1GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE, 100GbE, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, CPRI and OBSAI.

“Data centers are being upgraded to handle the exponential growth in bandwidth. System vendors are looking for solutions to meet restrictive size, power, and density constraints,” said Scott Feller, director at Cortina Systems, Inc. “28nm technology enables Cortina to develop a base platform architecture that meets system vendor requirements today and in the future while keeping a small foot print, increasing the supported data rate to 15G, while reducing power consumption by 50% over current production parts.”

“Latency, power, density, and cost are the critical differentiators for system vendors developing 10G switches for data center, storage, and financial markets,” commented Dale Murray, Principal Analyst at LightCounting, a market research company focusing on optical interconnects. “This is driving the need for high port density, low latency and power, and high feature integration in all components that go into these switches.”

The CS4343 includes an integrated 2x2 switch enabling redundant backplane and faceplate applications without needing an external crossbar device. The integrated switch functionality supports 1+1 protection switching and broadcast functionality in both directions. The device supports link quality monitoring for the inactive redundant link to enable fast switching. In addition, the CS4343 has a fully symmetric architecture with EDC capability on both ingress and egress directions. This enables applications such as translation from KR4 backplane to CR4 cable in blade server designs using a single device, reducing system cost.

The CS4343 has integrated AC coupling capacitors, and supports reference clock free operation to reduce overall system BOM cost. The device also includes capabilities such as real time eye monitoring, loopbacks, PRBS generators and checkers, and hardware interrupt and GPIO pins for test and debug purposes.